Why Your Partner Shuts Down: Emotional Immaturity and Childhood Wounds | Dr. Lindsay Gibson

Yeah.

Oh, Dr. Hawkins, what a great setup for talking about this.

Because, I mean, those questions, if you have gotten enough interaction and enough attachment and bonding and a supportive enough relationship within yourself to build a sense of self and to have some self-reflection, to have some self-control, it's just... incomprehensible to you that this person that I love, you know, that maybe I've been, you know, achieve this closeness with at times could turn around and be so emotionally unavailable to me or appear to lose interest in the intimacy that we had begun to establish.

And it's just something that they can't comprehend because if you have the ability to relate when you're emotionally aroused or when you're upset and When you have the instinct to turn to somebody in a good attached form, turn to someone for relief and comfort or to express maybe something that you didn't like, you can't understand why that person that you're married to can't just do the simple thing and tell you what's the matter so that you can talk about it or reassure them or whatever.

And it's sort of like what happens with parents with little children.

Now we're going back to the thing about the pervasive emotional immaturity.

And I like that term because I think it captures how it affects the person's whole life.

When people are raising little children, if they don't know too much about how we come to not only know what our feelings experiences, our sensations are, but we begin to be able to put words and facial expressions on them.

If we have not gotten that kind of feedback from our parents, we really don't know how to communicate at an emotional level.

Like, There was a podcast, I don't remember where it was, but it was a podcast about a young woman who was accused of some terrible crime.

And when she went before the court, she had this flat face.

And they questioned her and they questioned her, you know, trying to elicit some kind of emotional response that would maybe make her a more sympathetic defendant, right? Yeah.

And she didn't do it.

And they interpreted that, that she didn't care or that she was a sociopath or whatever.

But everything that helps you deal with emotion has to be learned.

I mean, there are cultures where they learn that you do not animate your face in the face of an emotionally arousing situation.

Little children, when things get very emotional...

They shut down in the sense of being shocked.

You know, when people say, oh, my husband shuts down or my wife shuts down, they take that as a rejection or an unwillingness to connect.

But really, it's a shock response.

And with little children, when they are confronted with an emotion, they don't know how to handle.

They certainly don't have the words for it.

And nobody has even modeled to them with their facial expression how to show, I'm scared, I need your help, I'm interested.

They don't know how to do that.

So their face stays kind of immobile and they have big eyes and they look like a deer in the headlights.